GOLDEN AGES: DANCE

GOLDEN AGES: DANCE; 1930's To 1960's, When Dance Grew Strong

Published: May 15, 1994

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Companies and choreographers could nonetheless afford artistic risks because costs and ticket prices had not yet skyrocketed. American dance lived in poverty in this time, but it was also far from being treated as an institution. With few exceptions, there were no boards of directors or foundation and government grants to affect artistic policy.

In this atmosphere, art could be made for art's sake. I, for one, do not doubt for a minute the idealism of Martha Graham when she set out to say what she was compelled to express in dance.

The golden age of American dance was ruled by nothing if not by sincerity. The choreographer's language became as important as the work's subject and functioned for art's sake. Choreography became recognized as an independent art. Balanchine led the way in ballet (dance for dance's sake). But how people moved -- in works by Alvin Ailey, Paul Taylor, Twyla Tharp, Erick Hawkins Alwin Nikolais and others -- mattered as well.

American ballet companies also developed distinctive artistic profiles, in contrast to the all-purpose style of today's regional troupes. (More recent models in this era were the Harkness Ballet, the Joffrey and two groups founded in 1969, Arthur Mitchell's Dance Theater of Harlem and Eliot Feld's American Ballet Company.)

It is almost an effort to remember that there were no permanent American ballet companies unattached to opera houses before the founding of Ballet Theater by Richard Pleasant in 1940 and City Ballet by Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein in 1948. In the 1930's, pioneering attempts had been made by Willam Christensen, Ruth Page and Catherine Littlefield.

BUT PERHAPS THE PERFECT metaphor for creativity in dance's golden age is "Billy the Kid," the one enduring masterpiece created by Mr. Kirstein's Ballet Caravan, a small troupe that existed from 1936 to 1939. The ballet, choreographed in 1938 by Eugene Loring and seen since in other repertories, purports to tell the tale of William Bonney, the kid from Brooklyn who became the legendary outlaw. But its true subject is the larger historical scheme of nation-building on the open frontier, in which Billy's crimes are minor incidents.

The work as a whole crystallizes the course taken by American dance. Loring's choreography encompasses both the classical idiom and the heightened gesture that revealed inner emotion in early modern dance. The score, commissioned from Aaron Copland, foreshadows the dance field's collaboration with distinguished musicians. During the ballet, the hero strips to the waist and smokes a real cigarette; silence is used as the equivalent of music. Such devices, associated with everyday life, would be taken up in the 1960's for less theatrical purposes. The execution, eschewing the conventions of European ballet, identified the choreography as American.

In its entirety, the production suggested that formula should yield to invention, that dance could look forward. The general optimism that permeated "Billy the Kid" would be much harder to express -- in dance as elsewhere -- after 1969.